People have been working on faster ways of doing ray tracing for some time. Doing ray tracing in things like product renders is more common than games because your time budget is so much bigger. I can spend 20+ hours rendering a single frame of a car for a print ad, I don't have to put out 30+ frames like you would for a game (60+ for VR!).

Hopefully this hardware will push us to a place where we'll be able to more often utilize ray tracing. I suspect it will still be a while though.